3. or by doing something like this:
<xsl:variable name="prelim" as="item()*">
  <xsl:apply-templates mode="ac:image"/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="images"as="element()*" select="$prelim/self::*"/>

On 31.03.2019 21:00, Martynas JuseviD
ius martynas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Hi,

I have a simple snippet like this

         <xsl:variable name="images" as="element()*">
             <xsl:apply-templates mode="ac:image"/>
         </xsl:variable>

Sometimes the ac:image templates will return an <img> element,
sometimes nothing.

In the case where there are no elements in the variable, I get an error

     Required item type of value of variable $images is element();
supplied value has item type text()

When I output the text, it's just whitespace.

The element() cardinality is *, so why can't the processor just
suppress the whitespace and treat the variable content as zero
elements?

The processor is Saxon-CE BTW.

Martynas
atomgraph.com

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